5 Best Kitchen Gadgets for Healthier Cooking

Eating healthfully is effortless when you have the right gear. Juice, steam, and puree your way to a better diet with these good-for-you, chef-approved gadgets.

The 21st-Century Juicer

One trick to eating right: Build an arsenal of tools that’ll help you get the most out of nutritious foods. Like this juicer, which makes quick (and, even better, quiet) work of pretty much any fruit or vegetable. Though juice can’t beat raw produce for fiber content, the Hurom Slow Juicer yields much more of the other good stuff: Most juicers rely on centrifugal force to extract liquid from produce, but the Hurom also presses it out, which results in more juice, more vitamins, and more minerals. It’s so powerful it can even turn nuts and soybeans into homemade almond or soy milks. So if you’re like us, you’ll have fun figuring out what it can’t juice. (The answer: not much.) Hurom Slow Juicer, $359; slowjuicer.com

Bored with snacking on baby carrots? It’s time to get a dehydrator. Use it to make your own dried fruits or vegetable jerky without the sulfur and added sugar of many store-bought varieties. Less bulky than its competitors, this is one of the few models that’s small enough for a home kitchen. It also gets produce like kale and apricots crispy the quickest–an important feature since the drying process can take four to 12 hours. Snackmaster Express Food Dehydrator, $65; surlatable.com

The Go-To Grinder

Whiz up your own dried-spice blends to add flavor to food without calories or fat. Originally designed for coffee beans, this model produces the most consistent grind. Fast-Touch Coffee Grinder, $20; krups.com

The Ultimate Blender

The Vitamix’s power and durability have made it a chef must-have. For the hard-core home cook, it’s a luxe shortcut to smoothies, nut butter, and vegetable soups (the blade spins so fast it can heat cold ingredients to serving temperature). CIA Professional Series, $499; vitamix.com

The Classic Steamer

The Chinese bamboo steamer is best known for its role in dim sum and other traditional dishes, but it’s also our favorite low-tech tool for low-fat, big-flavor cooking. We like this model’s large (12-inch) diameter, which lets you cook our fish recipe for four in one batch. Be sure you have a big-enough pot or wok to set it over. Bamboo steamer basket, $15; williams-sonoma.com